From Action Man to Batman

From a seven-year-old who filmed his toy soldiers to the blockbusting The Dark Knight, featuring Heath Ledger's final screen appearance, this British-born director is now being compared with Hitchcock and Kubrick

He's supposedly secretive and hates giving interviews, so what do we know about Christopher Nolan as he stands at the pinnacle of his career? After all, it's only 10 years since he was making Kafkaesque three-minute films while studying for an English degree in London; only eight years since he stood onstage at the Hong Kong Film Festival asking the audience to contribute to the production costs of his movie Memento.

Now there's The Dark Knight, part two of Nolan's extraordinary reimagination of a franchise many thought stone dead. It's just about the biggest Hollywood event of the summer, not least because it features the last film performance of Heath Ledger. Even august Variety magazine has allowed itself to note de haute en bas the 'must-see excitement' around the release.

Born in 1970, the second of three brothers, Nolan holds dual US and UK citizenship and seems to move easily between the two countries and cultures. It is that cultural fluidity that is the key to what makes him so special.

When he was seven, he was filming his Action Man figures using a Super 8 camera. He didn't go to film school, but, instead, read English literature at University College, London, having gone to Haileybury, a public school in Hertfordshire. At university, he joined the film group, making a series of short films which soon began to picked up by festivals, most notably the Cambridge Film Festival which screened his student short, Larceny, in 1996.

Nolan is 5ft 11ins, has longish blond hair and piercing blue eyes and is very much the family man. There's also a theme of collaboration with a close and trusted circle running through his films. He cast his uncle - John Nolan, who appeared in the 1970s TV series Doomwatch - in a couple of films including Batman Begins. His writing work with his younger brother, Jonathan, six years his junior, also began at an early stage - Memento was an adaptation of Jonathan's short story, and they collaborated on The Prestige and The Dark Knight

Most striking of all his collaborations is that with his wife Emma Thomas, who is listed as the producer of every single one of his films since a student film, Doodlebug, in 1997. Other long-term collaborators include his regular cinematographer Wally Pfister and David Julyan, who has written scores for most of his films, and whose connection dates back to student days. He was paid a fiver for his work on Nolan's no-budget first film, Following

Finally, there's Christian Bale, who seems to have become an alter-ego for Nolan in the same way Johnny Depp has for Tim Burton, shooting three films together virtually back to back.

Nolan's student days had a strong effect on him. 'I wasn't a very good student,' he told one interviewer, 'but one thing I did get from it, while I was making films at the same time with the college film society, was that I started thinking about the narrative freedoms that authors had enjoyed for centuries and it seemed to me that film-makers should enjoy those freedoms as well.'

This was to become his trademark, the fractured narrative which proved such a resounding hit in Memento, which starred Guy Pearce as an ambiguous character with no short-term memory living in a sleazy motel. US audiences in particular were astounded by its audacity, but those who knew his short films, and Following, barely seen in the UK, let alone across the water, are aware that Nolan's early interest in experimental film-making has never quite left him.

'Film-makers like myself enjoy the fruits of experimentation and absorption by the mainstream,' he says. 'I think people's ability to absorb a fractured mise en scène is extraordinary compared to 40 years ago.'

Way before he was firmly established on the public radar, those in the business had clocked him. Insomnia, his film after Memento starred Al Pacino, Hilary Swank and Robin Williams and had George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh on hand as producers. It was a remake of a Norwegian film which again featured disorientation as a key element, in this case Al Pacino travelling to Alaska to investigate a murder during high summer when the sun doesn't set.

Though often thought of as technically brilliant, above all, Nolan has coaxed some outstanding performances from his actors, especially those channelling evil. Robin Williams's creepy turn as a killer in Insomnia is one of the best things he has ever done. On-set accounts of Nolan's ability to manage the very different acting styles of his three leads - Pacino's determination to rehearse, Swank's refusal to do more than two takes, Williams's need to underplay - proved just how sophisticated an operator he had become when dealing with Hollywood's biggest stars.

And then there was Batman Begins, a film that went on to gross $371m. Though Insomnia had done perfectly respectable, but not outstanding, business, the gods were still smiling on Nolan. Former can-do-no-wrong Hollywood wunderkind Darren Aronofsky was unceremoniously turfed off the project in development for the curious reason (bearing in mind what was to come later) that his version of the Frank Miller comic book was 'too dark'. Nolan was installed, inheriting the casting of Christian Bale in the lead. After Insomnia, it was also a chance to get back to what he really liked doing - scripting as well as directing.

Michael Caine, in a memorable quote, was to claim that Superman was how America saw itself and Batman was how the rest of the world saw America. Caine was cast as Batman's butler and subsequently became one of Nolan's regular performers (The Prestige, The Dark Knight).

Nolan, meanwhile, buckled down to cope with his instinctive dislike of CGI. 'I think there is this vague sense out there that movies are becoming more and more unreal,' he remarked at the time. 'The demand on ourselves was to be as spectacular as possible, but not depend on computer graphics to do it.'

Online fans showered Batman Begins with praise. 'The Batman film I always wanted to see,' said one. Nolan had arrived as a major Hollywood player.

What followed next, The Prestige, was a curious sidestep, but the kind of thing we have to expect from Nolan as he, like Soderbergh, tries to balance a personal need to make intricate, satisfying films with an ability to make blockbusters.

Starring Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman as rival Victorian magicians (some wags called it Batman versus Wolverine), it suffered from a release date that brought it up against the similarly themed Ed Norton film The Illusionist and a kind of old-fashioned earnestness perhaps springing from its literary background. It grossed less, overall, than Insomnia

Now The Dark Knight is convulsing the film-going public and Hollywood, with the Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker. There has been talk of an Oscar for Ledger. Nolan is on record as saying that it was the character of the Joker, so very different from the Jack Nicholson comedy turn, that turned him on to the idea of the sequel.

'He is not just a bank robber or an ordinary criminal who's in it for material gain,' says Nolan. 'His chief motivation is that of an anarchist. I talked to Heath a lot about it even when we were finishing the script, and we both agreed that the most threatening force society faces is pure anarchy, someone who wants to do harm for its own sake.'

It's clear that Ledger went somewhere very dark indeed to pull out this demonic figure, with his vermilion smear of lipstick, his panda eyes, halfway between a drag queen in the rain and Hannibal Lecter. Though The Dark Knight takes off where Batman Begins left off, this is already a different world, one of genuine malevolence, fear and failure of purpose. And though it has received a 12A certification in the UK, most people are describing it as akin to a horror film rather than a standard Hollywood mainstream release. This is a haunted film.

'I've never felt as old as I did watching Heath explore his talents,' Nolan was to write in a tribute to his friend soon after Ledger's death in New York

There's no news yet of what Nolan intends to work on next and whether his beloved Howard Hughes biopic will ever get made, or even the state of his putative Ruth Rendell project. One thing we can be sure of is that Nolan is here to stay and comparisons with both Hitchcock and Kubrick are not far from the mark.

Above all, Christopher Nolan offer a good lesson for young film-makers struggling to get anything made in this country - you don't have to make films about gun crime on council estates. You can dream anything on any scale you like. It may just happen.

The Nolan lowdown

Born: Christopher Jonathan James Nolan in London, 30 July 1970, the son of a British father and an American mother. His uncle is actor John Nolan; his brother is writing collaborator Jonathan. Now based in Los Angeles, he married Emma Thomas in 1997 and has four children.

Best of times: Though he considers himself a pessimist, Christopher Nolan's rise to the top of his game has been seamless, with Batman Begins fulfilling his childhood ambition to direct a blockbuster.

Worst of times: Nolan was forced to abandon a cherished Howard Hughes project when Martin Scorsese announced his own. The death of Heath Ledger.

What he says: 'One of the most compelling fears in film noir and the psychological thriller genre is the fear of conspiracy. It's something that I have a fear of, not being in control of your own life.'

What others say:

'Nolan wants viewers to stick their hands down the rat hole of evil and see if they get bitten.'Richard Corliss, Time magazine

'The question is whether people will be able to look past the creepy poignance of Heath Ledger's posthumous performance to see the stealthy, oddly underappreciated virtuoso at the helm.'Mike D'Angelo, Esquire